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Since its launch in December 2014, over half a billion dollars has flowed through the Robin Hood stock trading app. Offering no-commission transactions and a much more accessible experience than traditional stock trading, the service has attracted a significant number of young first time investors. Following their high profile Series A in September last year, with cash from Snoop Dog and Jared Leto, they’ve just pulled together a $50M Series B led by New Enterprise Associates.

Banks and financial institutions have not created products that serve younger generations in the most efficient way, according to Max Levchin, the co-founder of eBay-owned payments giant PayPal. It’s a major opportunity for startups that seek to rethink financial technology—one Levchin hopes to leverage with his own, Affirm.

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Daniel Faloppa is busy building Equidam, a service that aims to provide some automation (and sanity) to SME valuations. We’ve previously looked at how FinTech is enabling the startup ecosystem, and here is perhaps one of the most unique and interesting examples of that in action.

We asked Daniel about some of the use-cases for Equidam, and the challenges they’ve faced.

Suril Desai is an analyst at Nishith Desai Associates, one among a handful of law firms in India trying to develop a way to present the Bitcoin framework effectively so that its legitimacy comes from the fact that it is decentralized, rather than regulated.

DOWN AN ALLEY just outside the WIRED offices in San Francisco, Darwin Cafe is one of those coffee shops that gleefully resists technology. The place runs on an old-fashioned register, with big keys that thunk and a drawer that ka-chings. Jack Dorsey would get itchy just walking inside.

The glitzy skyscrapers of Hong Kong’s financial center stand in stark contrast to a dirty grey industrial building in the city’s run-down Kwun Tong district. Yet nine floors up, in an office bereft of any form of signage, a new artificially intelligent investor is taking shape.

IN THE years since the crash of 2007-08, policymakers have concentrated on making finance safer. Regulators have stuffed the banks with capital and turned compliance from a back-office job into a corner-office one. Away from the regulatory spotlight, another revolution is under way—one that promises not just to make finance more secure for taxpayers, but also better for another neglected constituency: its customers.

The official inauguration of Apple Watch brings great expectations inclusive of changing the way we think about how to gather data and turn it into information. Until now, achieving information gathering meant entering information via keyboard, voice or video. Now, we are embarking on a world of ‘sensor data’ and it suits consumers.

After a huge year in 2014, the payments sector of FinTech is booming. Venture capital investment reached an all-time high, and the money continues to roll in this year. There’s no shortage of activity happening with mobile, processing, transfers and cryptocurrency to keep us on our toes. Large tech companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook have ventured into payments territory, operating alongside traditional giants like Visa, MasterCard, and First Data. Smaller startups such as Stripe and Square have already proven themselves prolific, and even more promising companies are cropping up each month.

Here, we’ve crunched a world wide web of information to put together a brief overview of the current payments ecosystem, including key companies disrupting the sector and ones to watch, plus future prospects and challenges. But first, let’s begin with some history.